Alaijo Shaune Johnson

Alaijo Shaune Johnson—known to friends as “Shaune” or “Shawn”—was a Portland teenager and a student at Jefferson High School. Descriptions in contemporary local accounts place him as 17 years old in late summer 1996 and identify him by the warm, familiar names his family and peers used. He was part of a community of classmates and neighbors in Northeast Portland whose ordinary evenings and school routines were the setting for the years he lived and the relationships he formed.

Though public records and contemporary reporting about Alaijo focus on the day he died, what can be respectfully remembered is that he was a young person on the cusp of his senior year of high school—an age when many hopes and plans for immediate future study, work, athletics, friendships, and family time take shape. As a Jefferson High student, he belonged to a school community where arts, athletics, and classmates shaped daily life for many local youths.

The public record preserves details about the location and date of his death, and reporting from the time records that friends and neighbors knew him by his nicknames. Beyond those factual anchors, there are many personal memories that remain private to family and friends. Those who knew Alaijo best—his family, classmates, and neighbors—hold the fuller portrait of his humor, ambitions, relationships, and small daily gestures that made him who he was.

Alaijo’s life, though cut short, mattered to the people who loved him. This page honors his name and identity, and acknowledges both the facts recorded in public sources and the private remembrances that give a young life its true shape. If you knew Alaijo and would like to share a memory or photograph for the memorial, those recollections can help ensure he is remembered first for who he was, not only for how he died.